By: Carol Rojas Ramirez
Hey there! If you haven’t checked out my Transcription entry, you totally should. It’s on the Reynolds Pamphlet, which is the historical document that I will be using for my annotation project. This Pamphlet was written by our very own Alexander Hamilton when his lover’s husband (James Reynolds) threatened his political career by falsely accusing him of embezzling funds (I know… it’s kind of crazy).
Of course, since Hamilton had beef with literally everyone, the Pamphlet caught many peoples’ attention and it had a lasting impact on his career.
I was really interested by the document primarily because of the amount of drama that has surrounded it for years. Now that I’ve started doing research on the background, I have found so many more conspiracy theories and stories that explain this bizarre time in Hamilton’s life. More importantly, I have found that a lot of the stuff surrounding the Pamphlet isn’t just cheap gossip but a window into the political and socioeconomic climate of the time. It has been interesting and rather entertaining learning about the blackmail plot and questioning Maria’s involvement in the whole scheme but when you really start reading the document, you start to wonder who James Reynolds was and if he considered Hamilton as an enemy (politically, not just because he was sleeping with his wife). This got me deeper into the political factions of the time as well as Hamilton’s time as the Treasury Secretary. Unfortunately, it has been rather difficult to find primary sources that provide some insight into these topics. There are certainly many articles out there that give you a run-down on the affair and what they think really happened between the three people but there are not documents in which Hamilton describes his time as the Treasury Secretary. Yes, there are many finance and economics journals that describe Hamilton’s ideas and how they have shaped the nation, but they don’t provide specific detail as to how this affected his personal life. Getting any insight into James Reynolds was even worse. This is the stuff that I found on Google Scholar:
Moving forward, I am going to try to do some more reading of Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton as he provides good summaries of the occurrences in during this time in Hamilton’s life. I also think that it will be a good jumping off point for my research. I think that if I can read summaries and then try to get more information on a specific topic, like the Federalists and the Anti-Federalist factions, I’ll be able to piece the different details together to understand the Reynolds Pamphlet a bit better.